Alexis Tadié led AGON, a major research programme funded by the French National Research Agency (ANR), devoted to the study of disputes and quarrels in the early modern period from a comparative perspective.
The project examined controversies across a wide range of cultural domains — literature, theatre, the arts, philosophy, and the sciences — focusing in particular on France and England. By comparing disputes that circulated across national boundaries with those shaped by specific institutional and cultural contexts, the programme explored how intellectual and cultural life in early modern Europe was structured through conflict, debate, and negotiation.
AGON brought together an interdisciplinary team of scholars working between Paris and Oxford, and contributed to a rethinking of literary and cultural history as a field in which social, political, and intellectual questions are articulated through controversy. One of the lasting outcomes of the programme was the creation of a database of early modern quarrels, alongside a series of scholarly publications and collective events.